Thanks to Dave Mazella at The Long Eighteenth for posting about the online publication of Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Literary Studies. This looks like a great compilation of recent digital studies scholarship, though Dave rightly pointed out the problem of limited interactivity. We were pleased to see that the Blake Archive was mentioned several times, particularly in John Walsh’s article on “Multimedia and Multitasking,” in which he cites the Archive as a laudable example of digital scholarship.
[x-posted to The Long Eighteenth]
Hi Rachel,
I read the Drimmer piece and more or less agree with it, though I think that “blogs” like the Orwell diaries are only using the bloggish day-by-day format to mimic the annalistic perspective of the diary. There’s a kind of conceit going on there, in other words. there are other examples of such pseudo-blogs out there who similarly exploit that perspective.
From my perspective, the most important aspect of the scholarly blog is its inherently collaborative dimension–even if you’re a single person (me) writing a post, you are potentially addressing the entire interweb. In a historical moment where the audience of, and support for, print scholarship is vanishing, this potential new audience and its perspectives seem very important to me.
So for me, the interactivity is crucial for ensuring a continually updated, refreshed resource for the maximum number of potential users.
DM